Confronting The Darkness
by Xanthous Xyster
Summary: The chilling, thrilling tale of a lone man in the wilderness who in his confrontation, tries to run, but Can't Escape!


The light lapping of the waves disturbs my silence. This incessant sinusoidal sin against the cliff beneath the ground beneath my feet is a pokemon using rollout, ever gaining strength, ever ebbing away at my supports and washing away the whole of my island, the whole of my lonely Cinnabar Island. And soon, I know, the waves will take me away, too.

Although it was a scream that woke me, sweating in the sheets with my beard beleaguered with baleful perspiration, all I hear as I peer into the dark of the darkness is that repetitive crash upon crash. I swear, one can escape the lights, the people, the world, but not even here can one escape the noise; noise, always there is the noise: the noise of thunderbolts falling from heaven, the noise of the volcano crying with explosive blood, the noise of the despondent earth groaning under its own weight, and, of course, the noise of the pointless splashing of the sinister and ceaseless waves. The noise drowns all else. This specific noise, this echoing recurrence, echos my footsteps' pacing and echos that awakening scream over and over again in my mind.

Yet already, I discover myself drearily doubting the realness of the scream; now, it seems that the scream might gleam in the same perspective light as a scheme from the world of dreams, from Gengar's Playground, where everything and nothing is real, where feelings and fear manifest and the only escape is just respite before his, that gengar's, final acquisition. I shake my head and the thought from my mind. Someone had screamed. The islanders and the tourists typically keep to the liveliness of the south, but I feel eventually they all seem to find their way up here, and someone had definitely screamed.

I return myself to my cabin, my shabby shelter. Summoning a growlithe from a dusty pokeball, which the canine is reluctant to leave and eager to return to, I grab a lantern for the creature to light, allow it to do so, and then indulge its true desire by relinquishing the pokemon of my presence.

Back out through the creaking door with my creaking bones, the lantern lends little illumination to the befogged darkness wherein the tall grass soaks my boots and the thick air soaks my skin. From the ocean, although the waves mostly meet with cliff faces, there is a small, sandy shore with a tight, tapered ravine extending upward and distending outward into many dried-up paths connecting to the elevated plateau and atop this plateau is the forest and above the forest which enshrouds most of the island, is the night, starless, moonless, and friendless. Tonight is not the night for inexperienced hikers, but even on such a night as this, my feet, which know this dark forest well, have harshly lowered accuracy in proper placement and direct direction. While I find myself descending through the forest, I lose myself doubling back down through that ravine, down one of those dried-up paths, back towards the ocean.

The trench cuts deeper and deeper into the island, the walls getting tighter, pressing against me, rising above me like looming golbats with my fate gripped tight in their talons. With each step bringing me closer to the shore, the fog around me thickens to the point where it seems to congeal and the very act of walking is like walking inside of the grime of a grimer. Yet I persist. I must. For some reason, my inclination to search for the screamer has used metronome (perhaps brought on by each beat of the ocean waves' mesmerizing pace) to metamorphose my mission into reaching the ocean shore. I am unmindful of the forest and the former home above me and solely aware that I am going, that I am moving forward, but not sure that the world is reacting to my act of going, to my movement. The fog is too thick. The only thing announcing the growing proximity to the ocean is the loudening lapping of the waves. Then, suddenly, there is a push behind me, and headfirst and covered in a milky layer of condensation, I pop out of the V-shaped crevice and onto the shore. My lantern extinguishes. The beach is small and rocky with tidepools splattered across its terrain, but I am, immediately and solely, aware of a foreboding feeling.

This cold and clammy feeling crawls over me. It is unseen, unpalpable, unstructured, yet at the same time, jeering at me to make something of it, teasing and tempting my mind to give it value or to find it extraordinary. Since birth, it has been there, present, waiting in every shadow, hiding in every burnt ash, occupying every vacuum. It is the feeling of lack, and of so much more or, more accurately, of so much less. It is undefinable, yet, now, I begin to comprehend it.

Despite the darkness, I see clearly reflected in each tidepool my pallid face and my pale fate, both staring back and deep into my eyes, my wrinkled, old eyes. Those eyes mock my own. Those wet eyes know that mine must one day dry in dismal death. I can't stand their pity nor their understanding, their ability to relate. None of that changes anything. Frenzied, I rush from pool to pool, smashing and splashing at each semblance, flailing at this frigid feeling that is all about me. Each visage blurs as I strike and returns to the nothingness it came from. However, the longer my attack persists, the more me's there are that multiply, with each drop forming a new pool and each water molecule reflecting anew this old face. With all the eyes upon me, I thrash into the ocean, trying to escape to a better place. Whereas all the tidepools, spraying splashes, and splaying specks of water return a myriad of reflections, I seek the solitude of one.

But even one is too much and as my wishy-washy face stares up from the shifting seas, I am reminded of the story of a young boy. A young boy who, years ago, helplessly watched his father drown. Then, he ran away from home, never to return. I had saved the newspaper clipping, although now as I stare into the vast, empty sea, I can't, for the life of me, remember why. Was the boy still missing? I never saw him again. Where did the boy go?

Where was that sweet youth now?

My wading has evolved into swimming, and before I know it, I am beset by the darkness. There is no land nor safe haven in sight. In this darkness, the only sound is the light, eternal lapping of the waves, hemming around me as impenetrable and inescapable as this darkness itself. Was the shore in front of me or behind me? I can't tell by the sound of the waves. I can't remember either. I see nothing. I could have sworn there was something out there, something beyond the setting sun, something more to the pith of this pathetic, putrid life, but there is nothing. Nothing after the descent, nothing to make it worth it, nothing at all. Just waves. Waves that echo the incessant ticking of a clock, tick-tick-ticking away all the little time I have left.

My God! Arceus! Ho-Oh! Anyone! Anything...

And it is me that's screaming. Lost at sea, drenched in woeful water, ignorant as to whether it's scared sweat, tragic tears, or a drowning deluge, I scream.

Into the perpetual darkness, I scream.


End file.
